Overview

In my career, I’ve probably reviewed over a thousand resumes as part of an interview team or as a hiring manager who owned the entire process. Now that I’m navigating the job market myself, I’ve turned that experience (or insider insight) into a system. If you want to move from simply ‘applying’ to ‘being sought,’ this is my playbook.

For most senior tech professionals, job searching is an infrequent and inefficient process. We’re experts in our domains, but not necessarily in navigating the modern job market. This can lead to a reactive approach that wastes our most valuable asset, time, on opportunities that aren’t a strong mutual fit.

To avoid that trap, I’m running my own search with a different mindset. I’m leveraging my experience as a hiring manager and using simple AI tools to build a proactive system. The goal is to focus my energy exclusively on the roles where I can provide the most value.

This playbook is built on three core components:

• The Mindset Shift: How to stop thinking like an applicant and start thinking like the solution to a hiring manager’s problem.
• The Targeting Engine: How to use an LLM to create a personal “Ideal Role Spec Sheet” that acts as a data model for filtering opportunities.
• The Execution System: A practical workflow for managing your pipeline and stack-ranking the top opportunities worth your time.

The Mindset Shift: Stop Applying, Start Solving

The single biggest mistake I see talented professionals make is approaching their job search from their own perspective. The default “applicant mindset” is self-centered by nature. It focuses on a list of our skills, our experiences, and our needs. We present ourselves as a collection of features and hope a company sees enough value to make a purchase, so to speak.

This has to be inverted.

A job posting is not a wish list; It’s a signal flare that reveals a business problem. A hiring manager is trying to eliminate a source of pain. Perhaps a key territory is underperforming, a strategic project is behind schedule, or the team lacks a critical skill needed to compete. They aren’t just filling a seat, they are acquiring a solution.

The candidates who consistently stand out are the ones who adopt a “solution provider” mindset. Think of it like a good consultant or a doctor. A patient doesn’t want to hear an exhaustive list of the doctor’s credentials; They want a confident diagnosis of their problem and a clear plan for a cure.

How to make this shift:

• Translate Job Requirements into Business Pains: Before touching your resume, read the job description and ask, “What is the business pain behind this requirement?” A request for “experience with multi-cloud deployments” is really about solving the pain of “our customers’ environments are complex and we’re struggling to integrate.”
• Frame Your Experience as the Solution: Now, address that specific pain with your experience. Instead of listing, “5 years of experience with multi-cloud deployments,” frame it as a direct solution: “Reduced integration time by 30% for customers with complex, multi-cloud environments by designing and implementing unified solutions.”

When you start framing your value this way, every part of your job search changes. Your resume becomes a proposal, and your interview becomes a consultation. It’s the difference between being a sniper and a shotgunner. The “spray and pray” approach is a low-probability game. A sniper approach, one that is targeted and intentional, is how you win.

A clear implication of this is that you’re applying to fewer positions, spending the time to customize your resume to show that you can bring the experience and motivation to solve the hiring manager’s business problems.

The Targeting Engine: Engineering Your Ideal Role

Of course, that targeted approach presumes that you’ve actually found that job to apply to. So how do you find the right job?!

Most job searches begin with a keyword search on LinkedIn or another job board. The problem with this reactive approach is that you immediately start optimizing for what the market is showing you, not for what you actually want. This dramatically lowers the signal-to-noise ratio and can lead you down a path of chasing roles that are a poor fit.

My approach is the opposite. Before I even open a search bar, I create a detailed document: my “Ideal Role Spec Sheet.” This document is the data model against which all potential opportunities will be measured. It ensures I am running the search, not the other way around.

This isn’t just a list of job titles. It is a multi-faceted specification that defines the role in detail. The key categories I included in my own spec sheet were:

• Company Profile: Stage (e.g., high-growth startup, established enterprise), industry, and defining cultural traits (e.g., “prefers documented processes,” “values remote-first collaboration”).
• Role Scope: The ideal split of responsibilities, such as 60% tactical pre-sales, 20% strategy, and 20% team enablement.
• Team Structure: The reporting line, the ideal team size, and the key cross-functional relationships that are important to me.
• Technical Focus: The specific technologies and business problems I want to engage with daily.
• Logistics & Compensation: The non-negotiables for salary, location (remote/hybrid), and expected travel.

A critical insight from this process is to focus on the work, not a preconceived job title. For example, a passion for coaching, technical enablement, documentation, and AI leadership doesn’t just point to a pre-sales role. Those same responsibilities are central to excellent Developer Relations, Technical Marketing, and certain Principal Architect roles. This spec sheet helps you find the right work, regardless of the title.

Creating this from a blank page is challenging. This is where an LLM becomes a powerful thought partner. I use it to help me articulate these core responsibilities with a prompt structured like this:

“Act as a Socratic executive career coach. I am providing my resume and my primary career passions. These are [e.g., coaching junior engineers, documenting complex systems, and driving AI adoption strategy]. Help me structure a detailed ‘Ideal Role Spec Sheet’ and then brainstorm a list of potential job titles across different departments (like Pre-Sales, DevRel, or Marketing) where these responsibilities are key. Please ask me questions, one at a time, to gain the context you need to build out the spec sheet. Whenever you ask me a question, provide 6 example answers, 3 standard and 3 creative, to help stimulate my brainstorming for an answer. As you build out each section of the spec sheet, confirm that I’m satisfied with the section before moving on. The spec sheet should include company growth stage, industry, and cultural traits; The role scope (types of responsibilities and a rough ratio of how they’re used); The team structures that I’d be happy working in (reporting line, team size, key cross-functional relationships); The Technical Focus (specific technologies and business problems I want to engage with); Logistics and Compensation (the non-negotiables for salary, location, remote/hybrid/on-site, and expected travel.”

This process yields a one-page document that becomes your north star for the entire search. It is the lens through which you will view every opportunity.

The Execution System: Managing the Funnel

With the right mindset and a clear target, the final step is to build a repeatable workflow. This is the operating system for your job search, and I run it like a sales funnel. It has three stages: Discovery, Pipeline Management, and Prioritization.

• **Stage 1: Discovery (Top of Funnel)**s This is the only time I open LinkedIn with the intent to browse. Using the keywords and concepts from my “Ideal Role Spec Sheet,” I look for roles that seem like a potential match. The goal isn’t to apply immediately; It’s to gather promising leads. If a role looks interesting, it goes directly into my pipeline management tool.

• Stage 2: Pipeline Management (Your Job Search CRM) A spreadsheet is not a pipeline. For this, I use a dedicated tool like Huntr, which acts as a Kanban board for my job search. Every opportunity is a card that I move through columns like Saved, Applying, Interviewing, and Offer. This provides an immediate, visual overview of my entire search, preventing good opportunities from falling through the cracks. It becomes the single source of truth for my process.

• Stage 3: Data-Driven Prioritization (The Scoring Engine) This is where the system delivers the most value. Once I have 15-20 promising roles saved in Huntr, I export the job details (title, company, description). I then feed that export into an LLM with my “Ideal Role Spec Sheet” and a clear directive:

  "You are a career analyst. I’m providing you with my ‘Ideal Role Spec Sheet,’ which is my scoring rubric. I am also providing a list of job descriptions. Your task is to score each job on a scale of 1 to 10 based on its alignment with my rubric. Afterward, give me a table of the positions, in descending order of score, which score 8 or higher. For each job on the list, provide the job title, company name, rubrik score, and a bulleted list of 2-3 key reasons for that score. "

  The output allows me to ruthlessly prioritize. This is critical because tailoring your resume to be the specific “solution” for each role is a time-consuming but essential process. You simply cannot do it effectively for dozens of applications. This data-driven step ensures your energy goes only to the applications with the highest probability of success, meaning those that score an 8 or higher.

  The most powerful part is the feedback loop. If I find myself drawn to a job that scored a 6, I’ll ask the LLM, “Why did this role score low despite having [appealing factor X]?” The answer might reveal that my spec sheet is missing a key preference. I can then update the rubric, making my scoring engine even smarter for the next batch of roles.

This three-stage system turns a reactive, often stressful process into a proactive, manageable project, ensuring your effort is always directed at the highest-value opportunities.

Conclusion

Running a job search doesn’t have to be a chaotic, reactive process. By combining a hiring manager’s perspective with a systematic, AI-assisted workflow, you can transform it into a high-leverage strategic project. It begins with the crucial mindset shift to being a solution provider, is guided by a precisely engineered ‘spec sheet’ for your ideal role, and is driven by a managed execution system.

A final, critical piece of advice: while LLMs are powerful partners for brainstorming and analysis, they are not a substitute for your own voice. Do not use them to blindly rewrite your resume. Your experience and accomplishments are uniquely yours. Use these tools to help you frame that authentic experience as the solution to a company’s problem, but the narrative must remain your own. Hiring managers can spot inauthentic, AI-generated content, and it will undermine the credibility this system is designed to build.

Ultimately, this system is about taking ownership of your career narrative. It’s about focusing your valuable time where it will have the most impact and showing up not as just another applicant, but as a strategic partner ready to solve problems.

If you have questions about using this system, please let me know, and I’ll happily engage in a discussion!